"Janny Wurts - Wayfinder(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

shipwrights; the cries of warriors and oarsmen entangled in the flood mingled with
shouts from the villagers who saw their fleet and that of the raiders become smashed
to kindling at a stroke. The horses swept on in a boil of foam that boomed like a
god-wielded hammer against the shore. Spindrift sluiced across the cliffs. Ancient
pines shivered and cracked at the blow, and boulders broke off and tumbled.
Drenched to her heels by cold water, Sabin cowered down, weeping for the
beauty of a thousand salt-white steeds that reared up and struck at the windy sky.
And with that release came understanding, at last, of what all along had been wrong:
her heart held no sorrow for the terrible, irreversible destruction that rendered her
whole village destitute.
Lights flickered through the pines at her back, as angry men lit torches. Shouts
and curses carried on the wind, and the tolling bell fell silent, leaving the seethe of the
seas a scouring roar across the reef. Sabin pressed her knuckles to her face. The
Wayfinder was going to be blamed. This ruin was his doing, every man knew, and
when they found him, they would tear him in pieces.
Pressed into her cranny by a weight of remorse she could not shed, Sabin saw
the wild horses swirl like a vortex and turn. Back, they plunged into the sea that had
spawned them, leaving churned sand and burst wood and snarled bits of rope. Amid
the roil of foam, a lone swell arose and broke; one mare spun away and parted from
her companions.
Sabin saw her stop with lifted head, as if she listened to something far away.
She tossed her mane, shedding spray, then raised up one forehoof and stepped, not
into water, but most irrevocably, out onto wrack-strewn sand.
Sabin cried out at that moment, as if some force of nature wrenched her, spirit
from flesh. Reflex overturned thought, and she was up and running inland at a pace
that left her breathless. Voices called out to her as she reached the lane, people she
knew, but she had no answer. The torchlight in the market did not slow her, nor the
press of enraged men who gathered to seek their revenge. Scraps of conversation
touched her ears and glanced away without impression--the in'am shealdi and his
vicious, unfair bargain--Juard's life, in exchange for the livelihood of all the village.
Boats had been broken and sunk. Folk would starve. The Wayfinder would be made
to pay, made to burn; they would pack him off in chains to rot in the dungeons of
the King's bailiff. A hangman was too good for him, someone yelled, his words torn
through with the sounds of a woman's crying.
Sabin stumbled and kept going, past the cedar shingles of the wool shop
where her mother stood on the door stoop. "Girl, where are you off to, there's
salvage work to be done, and soup to be fixed for the men."
But the rebuke of her parent was meaningless, now, and had been for quite
some time.
Deep darkness wrapped the hollow where the crossroads met the town and
the lane led inland through forest. Sabin went that way, her lungs burning, and her
eyes streaming tears. The terrible truth pursued her: she did not weep for loss. The
village was nothing to her, its hold inexorably diminished since the moment she left a
jacket on the beach.
By the stone marker on the hill above the market, the Wayfinder waited, as she
knew he would. He sat astride a mare whose coat caught the moonlight like
sea-foam, and whose eyes held the darkness and mystery of water countless
fathoms deep. She tossed her head at Sabin's arrival, as if chiding the girl for being
tardy, and her mane lifted like a veil of spindrift; subsided like falling spray.
The Wayfinder regarded Sabin gravely, the burning in his eyes near to